Sally Haslanger (2000), Noûs 34(1):31–55 — DOI-10.1111/0029-4624.00201
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-02 at the owner’s request, as one of the works filling out the record’s coverage of social ontology under the topic ADR-017 added; ADR-017 names Haslanger among the authors whose absence showed the gap.
NOTE-394 is the close reading of 2026-10-02, and it placed the work: Active. It is the record’s first work on social kinds as distinct from social groups that act, and its first statement of the ameliorative method: the question “what is gender?” is answered by deciding what concept a critical theory needs, constrained by a semantic condition (the term keeps its central functions) and a political one (left general). The definitions place gender and race in social position, not in bodies or psychology: a woman is someone subordinated because she is marked as female, and someone marked for subordination as male is neither a woman nor, in that context, functioning as a man.
Read it as a proposal. Haslanger says she is “less committed to saying that this is what gender is and what race is, than to saying that these are important categories that a feminist antiracist theory needs” (p. 52). The empirical premises about race (no racial genes, classification differs between Brazil and the US) are given as “matters of established fact” without citation (p. 43).
Bearing on what the record holds.
- Ritchie (LIT-486). Ritchie’s structuralism reinterprets these definitions: the social group women becomes a node in a social structure whose relations are subordination and privilege, with the bodily marker as a further requirement on occupiers. Ritchie quotes this paper’s p. 39 and p. 38 correctly. On Ritchie’s taxonomy, the groups defined here are feature social groups, kinds rather than organised wholes.
- Ásta (LIT-491). Ásta’s conferralism is the main rival account of the same categories, filed unread beside this one. Haslanger thanks “Ásta Sveinsdóttir” for comments (n. 1).
- The group-agency strand (LIT-391, LIT-401, LIT-159). No direct connection. The groups this paper defines are social positions, not organisations, and nothing in it treats women or a race as an agent.
- Natural kinds (LIT-244). The paper’s descriptive project asks whether race and gender terms track “social kinds” (p. 33), the social counterpart of the natural-kind question that SEP entry surveys.
Topic. social-ontology is primary: what gender and race are and what
makes someone a member. philosophy-of-language holds the method, whose
subject is revising a concept and when a term may be appropriated
(pp. 34–35, 46–48). ethics holds the normative aim and the argument that
an account’s marginalising some individuals is answered by the values guiding
it (p. 46). metaphysics holds the reality claim of the conclusion. No word in
the vocabulary names gender, race or feminist philosophy as such; the work’s
primary subject is held by social-ontology, so the lack does not block
filing; whether a word for it is wanted is a question for the vocabulary.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here points to the Anthology of the SOTA.